[rancid] Re: plus in the rant?

[Ed Ravin]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 04:56:12PM -0700, Austin Schutz wrote:
> 	Because rancid doesn't support it works for me. I have it set up so
> the name of the configured device (router.db) has to match what's in the
> prompt, nicely allowing for case insensitivity. As our company has absorbed
> other networks, it's been handy to force a bare minimum of organization to
> get things manageable.

But that's a customization you made to RANCID - over here, once I
patched clogin and rancid, there's been no problem.  My customer's
company name has the "+" in it (love them modern Internet biz names),
so it's not like they were thinking up ways to break RANCID before
they hired us.

> It has been my experience that it's just easier to have users fix
> their oddities (which I non-judgementally tend to privately refer to as
> stupid fu***ng bu****it) rather than deal later with the inevitable annoying
> repurcussions

I don't see any blowback from this - if IOS accepts the + as a valid
char in the prompt, and the router still works the way it is supposed to,
what's the problem?  If we later discover that the router won't do
something it needs to do, we'll change the prompt, and I'll get an
extra email from RANCID about the change.  Stil no problem.

Years ago I worked for a company that made network monitoring software.
We had a debate one day about whether we would support networks that
had more than one node with the same IP (v4) address.  Apparently, thanks
to the joy of NAT, such networks exist, and we had to figure out how to
discover those nodes and tell them apart, and telling the customer to
fix their network so that they could buy our software was not an option.

Has anyone ever asked for THAT feature in RANCID?